Friday, October 28, 2011

Ethon has noticed some interesting stuff going on in Boulder, a formerly anonymous blogger, who turns out to be a University of Colorado law professor has outed the law school scam.

Law school is, in terms of educational credentials, the last stop for many people in a social game that they have been brought up to play ever since, 20 years ago, their yuppie overachiever parents agonized over how to get them into the "right" preschool. That game is very expensive, in terms of what it requires in both economic and cultural capital. . .

This blog has focused for the most part on what law schools do badly. This post has been about what they do supremely well, which is to replicate and reinforce class privilege, under the rubric of rewarding native intellectual ability and the capacity for hard work. And of course the skyrocketing cost of legal education has played a crucial role in intensifying these effects. When I started teaching at a good state law school in the early 1990s, tuition was $5000 per year in 2011 dollars. Now it's more than $30,000. Many of my best students from my early years of teaching -- people from relatively modest social backgrounds -- would never have gone to law school if it had cost what it costs now. What law school costs now ensures that a much higher percentage of students than ever before will either be children of the affluent, or people who have neither the necessary economic nor cultural capital available to them to figure out that borrowing $200,000 in non-dischargeable loans to go to law school is almost always a terrible idea. That too is a form of social sorting -- and we are beginning to see the consequences of it on a grand scale.

On his group blog yesterday Paul Campos investigated the ubiquity of denial, analogizing climate change denial to denial that law schools are pricing themselves out of existence.

First, you have your flat-out Deniers. These are people who simply deny there’s any crisis. . . . .The law school analogy is the professor (there is, I am reliably informed by one of his colleagues, at least one such law professor, who interestingly is middle-aged and doesn’t seem to be suffering from senile dementia) who denies that the cost of law school has risen relative to inflation.

The warmers are deniers of the second order

they’ll acknowledge the earth is warming, but they’ll claim this is a natural cyclical process, rather than a product of human activity. The law school analogy are faculty and administrators who acknowledge costs have gone up and the employment situation is bad at the moment, but who treat all this as a natural, cyclical, and most of all temporary situation,

The second category are

your Fatalists. The Fatalists acknowledge there’s a crisis, admit it’s to a significant extent human-caused and likely to get a lot worse, but argue that at this point there’s little or nothing we can do about it. . . . . .

The law school analogy are people who admit the employment situation is terrible, that it’s going to get worse, and that it’s been made worse by the collective behavior of law schools, but who argue that there’s not that much law schools can do to improve it

The third are the

Inconvenient Truthers. The ITs take the same basic view as the Fatalists, with the crucial difference that they believe that, with a combination of enough consciousness-raising and concerted political action, the collective action problems can be overcome, and many of the worst effects of human-caused climate change can be headed off, or at least ameliorated at an acceptable cost. The law school analogy consists of the people inside the system who believe that radical reform is both necessary and possible.

And

The fourth group consists of the Sleepers — the people who just aren’t paying much attention to this issue one way or another.

20 comments:

And fifthly, those who esteem legal incompetence a boon to mankind, like ineptitude in the expansion of regulatory bureaucracy, a form of inflation they think more fearsome than the present rate of thermal bracket creep.

You've missed out the ones who, like the fatalists, believe (about everything) that it's inevitable, but that it's the working of the market and therefore necessarily all for the best. Except where the government is somehow involved.

About 35-40 years ago, I heard a talk by Michael Harrington, author of the 1962 book, The Other America: Poverty in the U. S. Harrington noted the looming oversupply of lawyers, saying that "when you got into a taxicab, you could hear a learned discussion of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard" (from the philosophy graduates). Harrington predicted that "In the future, you'll be able to have a superb discussion of torts and contract law".

All Online Assignment help is a web portal where students get help in making assignments for all the subjects, with the help of our experts. You will get 100% plagiarism free assignment. Experts consultation is also available for students. If they have any query they can contact with our experts anytime.

This opinion or feedback is known as reviews. For instance- if you're going to get online assignment service, and you come across Allassignmenthelp.com Reviews, you can get to know about the opinion of different consumers about the quality of service they provided them. These reviews will further help you to decide which service is better for you. In other words, you can say, reviews are the feedback from a consumer about a product or service.

Thanks for this info,Student’s life looks easy until you alter between your daily schedules and a large burden of assignments. In such an obnoxious situation, a perfect Programming Help is an nice choice to get rid this tight schedule. Programming Assignment writing help services comprise a team of top academic programmers and retired professors. They provide assurance that your entire academic object is getting completed with top quality researched and original contents. You will get a completely 100% detailed and error-free content that will expand your division in your college.Programming HelpProgramming Homework HelpProgramming Assignment HelpOnline Programming Help

They start making them a task which is totally fascinating and veritable. This online site constantly uses a copyright encroachment checker to guarantee that the work they pass on is composed adulteration free. my assignment help

Hello, I have browsed most of your posts. This post is probably where I got the most useful information for my research. Thanks for posting, we can see more on this. Are you aware of any other websites on this subject.dubai mall cinema

Moving can become a when you don't know how to pack the stuff or heavy machinery. This is the place where we can come handy as we provide the best moving services in your area. Give us a visit at Movers near me to know more about us in detail.

While using the printer sometimes the connection is lost between the printer and the device it is connected to and gives the HP Printer Offline Error. To resolve this issue our tech experts have written a blog regarding HP printer Offline issue, feel free to visit us at our web portal to know more in detail about the HP printer errors and how to tackle them.

Thank you for the auspicious writeup. It if truth be told was a enjoyment account it. Glance advanced to more added agreeable from you! However, how can we keep up a correspondence?Digital Marketing Strategy for Beginner

KoFi Button

Subscribe Rabett Run

The Bunny Trail By Email

Contributors

Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.